Yesterday I wrote about an essay by Borges titled Feeling in Death. A good companion piece to that essay is the poem The Cyclical Night, La noche ciclica. The poem expresses many of the same sentiments as Feeling in Death:

Night after night sets me down in the world

On the outskirts of this city. A remote street
Which might be either north or west or south,
But always with a blue-washed wall, the shade
Of a fig tree, and a sidewalk of broken concrete.

This, here, is Buenos Aires. time, which brings
Either love or money to men, hands on to me
Only this withered rose, this empty tracery
Of streets with names recurring from the past

In my blood: Laprida, Cabrera, Soler, Suárez…
…
Squares weighed down by a night in no one’s care
Are the vast patios of an empty palace,
And the single-minded streets creating space
Are corridors for sleep and nameless fear.
…
In my human flesh, eternity keeps recurring.